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Commodities, Mimesis, and The Lion King: Retail Theatre for the 1990s

1999; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 51; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tj.1999.0074

1086-332X

Maurya Wickstrom,

Cultural Industries and Urban Development

Commodities, Mimesis, and The Lion King: Retail Theatre for the 1990s Maurya Wickstrom (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. New Amsterdam Theatre and the Disney Store on 42nd Street. Photograph by author. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. “Show Your Character.” Photograph by author. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Toon Square Subway. Photograph by author. An advertisement in the program for the The Lion King, Julie Taymor’s stage version of the original Disney film, reads, “Enjoy your audience with the King. And remember, even in the jungle, American Express helps you do more.” 1 What is so striking about this ad is not only its blatant assertion of the mutually beneficial relationship between theatre and the market, but also its location of the bodies and minds of audience members inside the fiction of the musical. In this image, they are not merely an audience watching the lion king Mufasa on a stage but appear to be in the play, enjoying an audience with him. In the interests of extending mass consumption to realms such as art, hitherto under-exploited, the service and leisure industry, here represented by American Express, encourages consumers to slide from their actual location as spectators of a show to fictional participants in a drama in which their response includes the purchase and consumption of a multi-million dollar commodity and its tie-ins, in this case, the multiple incarnations of the Disney Corporation’s The Lion King. In this article, I argue that the theatrical embodiment of cartoon characters allows Disney and other corporations in the entertainment industry to transform what have become traditional capitalist strategies for attracting consumers. In a globalized market, characterized by transnational competition and potentially world-wide reach, the industry can no longer rely on the old techniques of displaying goods as objects for purchase. It is not enough to encourage consumers to have commodities; they must be compelled to become them. By creating environments and narratives through which spectators/consumers are interpellated into fictions produced by and marketed in both shows and stores, entertainment and retail based corporations allow bodies to inhabit commodities and so suggest that commodities, in turn, can be brought to life. As they are articulated through the bodies onstage and the bodies of consumers, the products in the store appear more sympathetic, more capable of acting as a surrogate for human interaction, and thus more powerful agents for turning audiences as well as their purchases into commodities. 2 [End Page 285] Before we can examine this process of commodity formation and embodiment, we ought first to look at the location of Disney and The Lion King at the New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street near Times Square, where it opened in November 1997, and in the city of New York, more generally. The article will accordingly begin with an analysis of the “New Times Square” 3 and then go on to look at the processes of embodiment and mimesis in the stage performance of The Lion King and its tie-ins. The “New Times Square”: Global Placelessness and Cartoon Mimesis The “New Times Square” is an area between 42nd Street, Broadway, and 7th Avenue in New York. It is “new” because it replaces what was seen as a decayed neighborhood, overrun by porn-shops and peepshows. Arguing that he was “cleaning up the neighborhood,” Mayor Rudolf Giuliani courted Disney to become the key real estate presence in the area. Disney requested and received considerable tax breaks, low interest loans, and contracts guaranteeing the presence of other leisure industry in the area, including an American Madame Tussauds and the American Movie Classics (AMC) theatre chain. 4 According to economist Richard Fitch, New York’s transition from a manufacturing to a service economy is irreversible but problematic, since it is a “one crop economy—office and luxury construction based chiefly on tenants in finance, insurance and real estate.” 5 Indeed, the current plan for Times Square acknowledges as it responds to this problem, since it emerged after an earlier plan to upgrade the real estate value of the area as an extension of an already underused midtown...